Blog

July 29, 2015 - May 28, 2015

At Typesafe, we have already partnered with quite a few consulting firms to provide professional services to companies looking to Go Reactive. In doing so, we ask each of our partner candidates to put together a Typesafe Activator template that showcases their skills, capabilities and quality of work. However, that doesn't give us much visibility into the specific strengths each firm brings to the table. To help provide that visibility, we recently created a capabilities model for partners that reflects the many different aspects of our technologies...

Typesafe Deputy CTO Viktor Klang goes into the world of microservices to see how these architectures emerge from the constraints of reality. Viktor reviews the problems imposed by reality, and shows how they can not only be solved, but how the constraints free us from misconceptions that are otherwise very easy to acquire. We also explore how distributed systems are at the heart of microservices-based architectures and how communication shapes the structure, behavior and development of the software...

After Typesafe migrated both repo.typesafe.com and repo.scala-sbt.org to JFrog Bintray, we requested Artifactory SaaS servers to be shut down. The shutdown resulted in unexpected service interruption on Travis CI's Scala builds and the outage of sbt community repository on July 23, 2015. Travis CI fixed their service interruption by updating its build environment. Typesafe corrected the sbt community repository outage by adding a new redirection service. We apologize for the inconvenience.

With the Reactive Manifesto now embraced by over 11,000 people and the Reactive Streams initiative in full swing with a 1.0.0 launch, we are seeing more interest in "Going Reactive" than ever before. Organizations large and small ask us questions like:

What does Reactive really mean and why should we care?

What does “Going Reactive” mean for our Development and Operations teams?

How can Reactive systems help us improve system resilience and scale elastically to accommodate bursty traffic?

What are the business drivers and market forces that we should be aware of, and how can my organization start the journey towards modernizing our existing applications and infrastructure?

From Jonas Bonér, Viktor Klang and Konrad Malawski, co-authors of the Reactive Manifesto and contributors to the Reactive Streams initiative, we have set out to produce a three-part “Reactive Revealed” series to give an interactive opportunity for enterprise architects and software developers (we even have some goodness for Operations and Executives too) to get started with understanding Reactive from the beginning, providing an overview of the technological foundation behind it all.

Ed Callahan, Senior Engineer at Typesafe, kicks off the series with a broad overview of Typesafe ConductR, a solution for managing Typesafe Reactive Platform-based applications using Play, Akka and Scala or Java across a cluster of machines. In this series, we’ll see how ConductR manages this new wave of message-driven, elastic, resilient and responsive applications while complementing existing configuration and management tools and developer workflow...

Last week, we were happy to have a Typesafe co-webinar with Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark. Our Big Data Architect Dean Wampler and Datatbrick's Lead Engineer for Spark Streaming, Tathagata Das (TD) provided a 1-hour presentation with Q/A on Spark Streaming, which makes it easy to build scalable fault-tolerant streaming applications with Apache Spark.

Last week, I came across this excellent, semi-hilarious informal study by Tobias Hermann, aka Dobiasd, which digs into 20+ programming languages and reviews the conversations, comments and sentiments from their respective subreddit feeds (WARNING: this may be NSFW due to profanity recorded by users). Regardless, I loved what I saw, and wanted to reach out to Tobias to ask him if he’d like a little coverage on the Typesafe blog, and why he ran this fascinating experiment. Responding humbly and with a good degree of perceivable curiosity, Tobias wrote me back...

In April, 2013, we published a blog post about Enterprise Scala Adoption Tips, but the time has come for an update. Not only that, we need to focus on how to help enterprise organizations adopt Scala and also the Typesafe Reactive Platform in general. Many enterprises make the decision to leverage Akka and Play Framework from the Java API, which we fully support.

As more enterprise organizations adopt Scala/Akka/Play, we find it important to help them engage the community effectively. This involves providing them with information about where they can find resources to empower their developers to learn as much about these technologies as possible, as well as to directly engage with the community on a daily basis. By following these steps, the likelihood of successfully adopting these technologies is much higher.

As we reviewed in our recent webinar with Roland Kuhn Reactive Streams 1.0.0 and Why You Should Care, the first version of the Reactive Streams specification is now live, and among other technologies from engineers at Netflix, Pivotal, Red Hat and Oracle, so are Typesafe's implementations of Akka Streams 1.0 and Slick 3.0. In this webinar, Typesafe engineer Endre Varga looks deeper into Reactive Streams and demonstrates Akka Streams 1.0, Akka HTTP 1.0 and Slick 3.0 for harnessing the power of streaming with back-pressure in your system.

In a recent conversation on the Akka User Google Group, we came across a very salient conversation in which we found some very straight answers to questions that architects ask themselves when deciding to adopt a tool or not. The answers below are from Justin du Coeur, the creator of Querki. Querki is still in beta, and represents is a new way of organizing your personal information powered by Scala, Akka, Play and Scala.js. As a one-man show, Justin wears many hats, which makes him an ideal candidate for cutting to the root of matter with these six questions for architects. You can read more about Justin and the Querki project on the project’s development blog and his personal blog, which blends conversations about software, science-fiction, SCA and gaming.

This naming update is kind of short because the work we are doing now needs to stay private for the next month or so.But, I thought it would be cool to share what we’ve been up to, in a general way. Currently, we are at the Generate Names stage of the process––which a lot of folks on Twitter got a head start on by sharing their suggestions and opinions publicly...

If you're an Enterprise Architect, the idea of architecture modernization is probably on your mind a lot; with the explosion of Reactive applications now entering the mainstream, understanding the implications of "Going Reactive" is a good thing to look into. After all, what do you do when you need to react quickly to competitive threats or new line of business demands, but your existing architecture is anything but nimble? In this conversational-style webinar with Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Michael Facemire, and Typesafe Enterprise Advocate, Kevin Webber, we go discuss some of the questions Architects are asking, such as...

The gambling industry has arguably been one of the most comprehensively affected by the internet revolution, and if an organization such as William Hill hadn't adapted successfully it would have disappeared. Watch Patrick Di Loreto, R&D Engineering lead for William Hill, deliver to nearly 1300 registrants what his company is doing to grow in a fast-paced industry where milliseconds can matter to users and real-time data analysis and reactions are the keys to competitive advantage.

In our most popular webinar to date with over 1500 registrants, Akka Team Lead and author Roland Kuhn presents the freshly released final specification for Reactive Streams 1.0.0 for the JVM. This work was done in collaboration with engineers representing Netflix, Red Hat, Pivotal, Oracle, Typesafe and others to define a standard for passing streams of data between threads in an asynchronous and non-blocking fashion. This is a common need in Reactive systems, in which the volume of streaming "live" data to process is not predetermined.

Today, I saw that Play Contributor Marcos Pereira, a self-described "Software Liar, Agile Drunker, Scrum Monster, Passionate Product Legendary, Curious Human Being, and Certified Unsatisfied Person" used Google Gource to create this fabulous 7-minute visualization (above) of the development of the latest Play 2.4 release, complete with a soundtrack by Funkwerk. Well, it really blew my socks off–and back on again.

Today we're excited to post a Play Framework story with Ben McCann, an active community contributor and co-founder of Connectifier, where Play retains a long-term, mission critical role at this leading big data and AI company. In this story, Ben discusses the recent Play 2.4 release and how the open source nature of Play Framework has benefitted Connectifier.

It's been exciting times here at Typesafe. In my four years here, we've grown as a company, and in a recent post by our President and CEO Mark Brewer, we announced that we've decided to change our company name to reflect our own internal changes. As a company dedicated to open source technologies, we thought it also made sense expose this journey to the community, and give regular updates during the process. But before I give you an update on the process, first I thought I'd describe why I joined Typesafe.

We've happy to promote that our friends at VirtusLab have become official contributors to the latest release of Scala IDE, version 4.1.0. In the original announcement, VirtusLab describes their efforts in helping the community and Typesafe make a first-class IDE for Scala development.

We will cooperate with Typesafe, Inc. on development of new releases with a great number of enhancements and features aimed at skyrocketing productivity of Scala developers. We are proud to be part of the team that has undertaken the great effort to build the IDE for Scala Community. Their work has had a great impact on popularity and adoption rate of the Scala language.

On behalf of the Play team here at Typesafe, I'm proud to announce the release of Play 2.4.0, named “Damiya”. The focus of this release has been dependency injection, allowing Play apps to natively be written in a way that allows loose coupling between components. This makes the apps easier to test, and paves the way for our plans to remove global state in Play 3.

From the blog

At Typesafe, we have already partnered with quite a few consulting firms to provide professional services to companies looking to Go Reactive. In doing so, we ask each of our partner candidates to put together a Typesafe Activator template that showcases their skills, capabilities and quality of work. However, that doesn't give us much visibility into the specific strengths each firm brings to the table. To help provide that visibility, we recently created a capabilities model for partners that reflects the many different aspects of our technologies...

Typesafe Deputy CTO Viktor Klang goes into the world of microservices to see how these architectures emerge from the constraints of reality. Viktor reviews the problems imposed by reality, and shows how they can not only be solved, but how the constraints free us from misconceptions that are otherwise very easy to acquire. We also explore how distributed systems are at the heart of microservices-based architectures and how communication shapes the structure, behavior and development of the software...